GPT Builder Tools by Top Road (YC W22) - Monetise your GPTs with in-chat payments in the OpenAI Store

@autoleadistqb hey! what are some PayPal alternatives that you'd want to see offered? We started with PayPal but agree, doesn't suit everyone, and are open to including other payout options.

@contentcatalyst there needs to be both! we enable a user pays model which is inadequate on its own. Some GPTs are fun and popular, and the developer should be made from a revenue share agreement from OpenAI given that it drives more Plus sign ups for them. But some GPTs are more advanced / expensive to run, or serves a very niche market, and so enabling user contributions makes these types of GPTs viable to develop and run. we allow our builders to offer free trials so users can see the quality and value before they pay. ultimately, it's a marketplace with lots of competition, and we welcome the fact that if users don't see enough value, they will vote with their feet and wallets, and so poor quality GPTs can't expect to make money.

@cryptowhalerb a lot of the free GPTs are thin wrappers of ChatGPT, which are certainly not worth using, let alone paying for. but custom GPTs do have the potential to offer advanced functionality, and we think it's reasonable that developers want to know if they can get a return on their time / effort to build and maintain a premium product.

@devtoolstonic these are apps built by third party developers in the OpenAI ecosystem. They currently don't get paid at all. Many of them have built these apps out of interest, curiosity and the promise of revenue share from OpenAI (which has yet to eventuate) for almost a year, we don't think it's particularly wild for developers to eventually want to get paid for their work, to connect their apps to paid APIs if that delivers more value, and to maintain these apps to a high standard. And it's user pays model, if users don't see value in a particular GPT, they won't pay! I also want to be clear, we believe this should be in addition to OpenAI's revenue share. Not instead of.

@curiowriter user trust is paramount. our product is what OpenAI calls an 'action', and every time a GPT uses an action, the user is informed and has to give permission (like how users have can accept or block cookies). With OpenAI, they see more granular info including the specific words that would be sent. obviously, if they do not give permission, then we do not receive any info from the user. the purpose is to help developers understand the user journey and optimise the user experience, otherwise it very much dealing with a black box with gen AI. as for payments, we use stripe because it is a safe and robust platform, and a lot of the information is stored at our database level and pulled in via API (rather than stored with the GPT which is much more prone to prompt hacking), it's also why we seperated out incoming payments (via Stripe) and outgoing payouts to builders (via PayPal) to have that additional layer of security. we would love to offer more payment options through - do you have any recommendations in particular? and could you elaborate about tier system for different users? haven't hear about that yet, sounds like it could be interesting though!

@chiefops25 hey paul, yeah this is the multibillion dollar question for gen AI more broadly! we're so used to the internet being free, but generative AI is expensive to run on a unit basis, and so the pricing really has to evolve to support the cost. partly developers need to be more selective about what you ask a LLM to keep costs under control, but that only goes so far. Eventually the user will have to pay to support the additional cost... it could be that people just pay for a baseline AI subscription (for ChatGPT Plus, or equivalent) and get access to apps for free (like another netflix subscription) or they pay for apps they want directly. Let's see how it evolves! It's early days!